Contrasting models of posttraumatic stress disorder: Reply to Monroe and Mineka (2008).

We address the four main points in Monroe and Mineka (2008)'s Comment. First, we first show that the DSM PTSD diagnosis includes an etiology and that it is based on a theoretical model with a distinguished history in psychology and psychiatry. Two tenets of this theoretical model are that voluntary (strategic) recollections of the trauma are fragmented and incomplete while involuntary (spontaneous) recollections are vivid and persistent and yield privileged access to traumatic material. Second, we describe differences between our model and other cognitive models of PTSD. We argue that these other models share the same two tenets as the diagnosis and we show that these two tenets are largely unsupported by empirical evidence. Third, we counter arguments about the strength of the evidence favoring the mnemonic model, and fourth, we show that concerns about the causal role of memory in PTSD are based on views of causality that are generally inappropriate for the explanation of PTSD in the social and biological sciences.